At 1:13, Ford wrote home that "Just arrived at Gradivoj's house. We we diverted to Budapest due to fog and put on an eight hour ride. I will send more details later after I confirm each of you received this. All is well.". He also exchanged a couple of emails with his family and by 2:00 we "hit the sack".
He and I were roommates in the girls' room, taking their couches, while the four of them shared the big double bed and Lena's single somehow. He snores horribly, had a throat surgery once, and the couches aren't quite right, something broke inside. The girls didn't mind when they were sleeping on them, I guess they didn't have so much weight to press on the hard spots. The two of us didn't have the luxury, but despite his snoring and my hip hitting the tough spots, my fatigue was just overwhelming.
Later, around noon, as he wrote to Greg, "Gradivoj and I went to the shoop today to meet with the 3 musketeers. Had a short meeting, ate pizza and drank some beer. We will be getting together tomorrow after lunch (hopefully Pali will be coherent enough by then) for the start of formal training. I We at at Gradivoj's, so send me any issues or forward any email I have received to me now if you will and I will check back in 15-20 minutes. Otherwise, have a happy new year."
That „shoop“ where we met (and did once more while he was here) is a pizzeria in a backstreet near Lesnina. I never went there again, and it's still operating even today (2022), all the time under the same name, which is rare.
Greg forwarded this email he sent to someone (a banker?):
I just found your email in my stack and cannot determine whether Ford (my partner and the VP Engineering) responded -- as he told me he would. I don't want you to think we have forgotten about you.
We are, indeed, running like crazy. Ford is in Yugoslavia today, following up on a trip I made a few weeks ago. We are hiring a worldwide expert in Visual FoxPro, Gradivoj from Yugo and moving him here. Ford is there to discuss hiring 3 of Gradivoj's friends to open a small programming office there. Ford will be there for a week gettting to know the guys, training them in our development work, and evaluating how we should proceed.
We have recently had the data warehouse project approved by IGWL-SD (Ricky's group). I was at IG last week and spoke with Holerith Dole about you. I told him that I didn't want to raid a client :-), but that we should, at the very least, talk about getting you involved with the project on the IGWL end. This would be GREAT database and project management training for you -- and then we could raid you later ... when you know more !!! :-) :-) (Just kidding -- but you could decide to call us on your own!)
I will be back in IG for work sessions on the data warehouse 5 and 6 January. If you are interested in getting together, either contact me directly or just set it up with Holerith Dole or Ricky. I think it would be great for you to be involved in this project. It really is a unique opportunity for you.
If Ford has already contacted you, I'll find out in a week and one half, when he returns. If he never did contact you, please accept my apologies and let's just move forward from here.
Later, Ford's email to Greg:
No goats. After the fiasco at Dulles (I am so glad you were still at the office and Julie was near the office. I am sure that you thanked her, but please thank her again for me. As you will hear again below, Air France would have been able to get me to Paris the next day, but not Belgrade) I got to Paris just fine and made the connection with no problems. The flight was very full, only a couple of empty seats.After a couple of hours, we landed, but were told that we would not be getting off the plane immediately. Everybody but me must have been aware that we were in Budapest, I think that they originally announced that we had been diverted because of fog, but would be heading to Belgrade soon. Soon, another annoucement was made and everyone started to raise hell. I asked someone who I had heard speaking english, and she informed me that we would not be flying to Belgrade, but going by bus, a 8-14 hour trip, depending on the weather and how long they keep you at the border. Once inside, there were two young Air France employees that informed us that the captain of the plane wanted to leave right away and did not want to take the luggage off. Needless to say, the shit hit the fan again. The Hungarians were just standing around shaking their heads at this bunch of crazy Yugos screaming at the top of thier lungs. Luckily, English seemed to be the common language, so I was able to understand what was going on. The poor Air France employees were getting quite flustered by then, but were soon able to convince the captain to unload the luggage, especially after realizing that there were no flights from Paris to Belgrade the next day. The next fight was about the bus trip, but this was resolved because they could not find any bus line that would agree to take a load of Yugos for some political reasons. Anyway, by that time we had 90 minutes to get 90+ people to the train station with all their luggage. I assited an older lady who had just returned from visting her son and daughter-in-law in Washington DC with her extremely heavy luggage, along with my four bags to the bus and on to the train station. Once at the train station, we had 15 minutes for Air France to buy all the tickets and get us on the train. Needless to say, the train was 30 minutes late leaving the station at 4:30 pm, not that I think it really mattered. We were crammed 6-8 into compartments designed to hold 6 with a lot of very surprised looking Hungarians. The smoke was thicker on the train than any bar I have ever been in! After about four hours most of the Hungarians had gotten off and we we only 3-4 in each compartment. Luckly the border check was no problem, the guards were having a party when we pulled into the station and not expecting such a full train, so they basically just checked passports and 1-2 bags per car. We pulled into Belgrade at midnight and Gradivoj was there to meet me. After about an hour drive (the fog was still bad) we ariived at Gradivoj's house and stayed up for another hour unwinding. We were up 4 hours later on our way to the office.
Quite an exciting start, hope everthing else goes much smoother.
BTW, he brought me the Hackers' guide, a thick book of some 800 pages, by Kristin and some other guy, said it's a surplus copy, damaged in printing, some dozen pages were printed twice, thus doubling the amount of text on those pages and making them five times harder to read... Said he'll get another from the publisher. There's fun ahead for me...
In the evening there was supposed to be the doček, but we didn't prepare anything special. Ford was playing card games with Lena, mostly the simple memory games, and she beat him in each. As Greg would say later, each time we met again, "is Lena still smarter than me?".
When midnight came close, I drove us all downtown, and we were there with few thousand other people on the main square, with some band playing and the countdown and everybody kissing after the countdown. Met Pali, Višnja and a few others.